Learn Forgiveness from Your King (Matthew 18:21-35)

Sermon for Pentecost 17 (10/5/2014)

Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Theme: Learn Forgiveness from Your King!

            Let’s begin with prayer: Our Father in Heaven, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Amen

Every week that prayer I just prayed flows past your lips and bounces around in this sanctuary (hopefully more than once a week!). This prayer, the Lord’s Prayer) has become second nature to you. You’ve said it countless times in your life. This prayer has been carved in the tablet of your heart by constant use – you couldn’t forget it if you wanted to.

Forgive us our sins (or trespasses) as we forgive those who sin against us.

It’s an easy prayer to say, and that’s good because it is a good prayer, but doing it… actually forgiving as God forgives us… that’s an entirely different matter.

Forgiving can be a really, really hard thing to do. Sure, there are little things that are easy to forgive. If I stepped on your toe in a crowded room, I don’t’ think any of you would withhold forgiveness from me. But we all know by experience that people can, and do, hurt us in ways that are much more painful and lasting than just stepping on our toes. It’s hard to forgive when someone has hurt you, and I mean really hurt you. It’s hard to look someone who just hurt you in the face and forgive them from your heart, as Jesus tells us to do today, with no trace of lingering bitterness, resentment, or anger.

It’s hard to forgive when, often, the person who hurt you isn’t just some stranger on the street, but someone near and dear to you. It’s hard to forgive when sometimes the people who hurt us in the past seem to misuse our forgiveness as they keep on hurting us, over and over and over again.

It’s hard to really forgive which means our gut impulse, as humans, is to turn forgiveness into something that is earned. Our gut impulse is to withhold forgiveness until they’ve said they are sorry, or if they are one of those people who have hurt us before, until they prove they are sorry by how they live.

It doesn’t make it any easier to forgive when you realize that we are surrounded by people who are really bad at forgiving. I’m sure all of you have had more than your share of family, or friendship drama where friend A is mad a friend B because of the look he gave her, or some other perceived slight. I’m sure all of you have seen lifelong relationships torn apart by petty differences founded on a stubborn refusal to forgive – maybe you are now or have been a part of one of these all too common refusals to forgive.

It’s hard to forgive in a dog-eat-dog world like this. It’s hard to just forgive and forget in a world where it often feels like if I don’t look out for myself, no one will – and so if someone has hurt me I need to remember that, not forgive and forget it, or else they might just hurt me again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, right?

Today we get one more example of how, even though the Bible is a very old book, it’s still an incredibly relevant book. Jesus’ disciples were wrestling with the very same thing I have just been talking about – forgiveness: when to forgive, when to withhold forgiveness, how often to forgive, how completely to forgive…

Jesus had just been teaching the disciples about dealing with someone who was sinning – sinning against you, sinning against God. He has just walked them through the steps they were to take: approach they guy one-on-one and try and get him to see his error and say he is sorry. If that doesn’t work, bring one or two other people with you. And if he still refuses to say he is sorry and change his life, get the whole church involved.

Then good old Peter asks the all-important question for humans like us, who recognize how hard it can be to forgive someone who has wronged us, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?” So, James sins against me, he hurts me, I go through these steps you just told me to follow, he says he sorry, but what happens when the next day he hurts me again. How many times do you expect me to do this little dance with him? How many times am I supposed to forgive him before I get to say, “No, you’ve wronged me too many times, I’m done with you?” This forgiveness thing is too hard for me to just keep on forgiving forever, so what is the limit?

Then Peter throws a number out there, “Up to seven times?” It’s probably worth noting that Peter didn’t just grab this number out of thin air. Maybe he was hoping for another pat on the back from Jesus like he got a little earlier when he had confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. You see the teachers of the law, the Rabbi’s of Jesus time, didn’t like to leave questions on spiritual matters unanswered. They loved making rules about anything and everything. One of those rules answered this very question: “How many times shall I forgive my brother or sister?” According to the Rabbi’s the number was three. If someone sins against you three times, forgive him, but anything more – you’re done, they don’t deserve your forgiveness any more.  Peter looks at that number, and well, he’ll do one better. He’ll forgive twice as much, and then some.

But Jesus didn’t pat Peter on the back, instead Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”…

I have to imagine that this came as a bit of a surprise to Peter and the rest of the disciples. It’s kind of shocking to me too. I mean, I can get on board with forgiving someone once, twice, three times, maybe even seven times, but what if you just kept sinning against me? I’m guessing that somewhere around eight or nine I would start grinding my teeth, finding it hard to say the words, “I forgive you.” I’m betting you wouldn’t even make it to twenty before I would be avoiding you like the plague, and resenting, not forgiving you in my heart. 77 times!?!?

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us… it’s easy enough to say, but doing it… now that’s impossible.

But Jesus didn’t stop there. This question of Peter presented Jesus with a teachable moment. It was important to Jesus that his disciples understand what forgiveness really looks like. It was important that they wrap their minds around the truth he was teaching them that day, and so he told them another parable, another story so they could learn what forgiveness was all about. Jesus says, “You want to learn about forgiveness from God’s perspective? What it looks like in God’s kingdom? How often to do it? You’re not going to learn that from the Rabbi’s, and you’re not going to learn it from your own heart. This is how forgiveness works in my kingdom…

“The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.”

It can be difficult to pin down what measurements like a “talent” are in today’s terms, but it seems that a talent at Jesus’ time was a sum no less than 6000 denarii. A denarii was the accepted wage for one days labor – go work an eight hour shift at McDonalds, and you get one denarii as your pay. One talent is 6000 days labor, or twenty years of six eight hour shifts a week working at McDonalds – for just one talent. And this guy owed the king 10,000 talents! It makes you wonder how this guy could have possibly run up a debt like this. This would be like the IRS sending you a bill for $1 Trillion due by the end of the week. This debt is impossibly high.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The king in this little story of Jesus’, that’s God. The man, that’s you and me. There will come a time for all of us when our king, our God, will call us in to settle our accounts with him.

And the debt? Well, that’s painfully obvious too, isn’t it? It’s the selfishness, it’s the greed, it’s the lust, it’s the anger, the impatience, the stubbornness, the worries, the doubt. From the moment you were conceived, you have been sinning against God. From the moment you were conceived you have been racking up a debt that you can’t possibly hope to pay.

“At this the servant fell on his knees before [the king]. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’”

But, it ain’t going to happen, is it? You’re never going to do it. You can’t pay off the impossible debt your sin has racked up. But that’s ok. That’s ok because your King, your God, has his own idea of what forgiveness should look like. “The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled his debt and let him go.”

Forgiveness in God’s kingdom isn’t something you have to earn. It’s a gift – an endless gift to pay off your endless debt. It’s rooted in his mercy – that pity and love he feels for us when he sees us helpless and bound for hell.

We come before our God today, every day, on Judgment Day, weighed doubt by the debt of our sins, and instead of selling us into slavery, instead of sending us to hell, he forgives us. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our debt from us he told us in the psalm for today – we’ll never see it again. He forgives our wickedness, and remembers our sins no more he tells us – he forgives and he forgets, it’s as if it never happened when he looks at us. Even though we have sinned against him way more than 77 times, even though we couldn’t even count all our sins against him, there is no limit to the forgiveness your King earned for you on the cross, where he paid that debt in full.

That’s what God’s forgiveness looks like, that’s what forgiveness looks like in God’s kingdom, now back to the matter at hand. How many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?

Our King’s forgiveness changes how we answer that question, doesn’t it? What we don’t do is act like this wicked servant in Jesus’ parable. We don’t come into church here on a weekly basis, sit in front of God’s word on a daily basis, hear him tell us that our innumerable sins have been completely forgiven and forgotten, and then walk out that door and refuse to forgive the comparatively small and insignificant sins that others may commit against us. We don’t hold comparatively little sins over the heads of other people when we have had 10,000 talents worth of sins removed from our heads. There’s no more room for grudge holding in our lives. Petty arguments and stubbornness have no place in our relationships.

No, forgiveness isn’t all of a sudden going to become an easy thing to do. Forgiving and forgetting the hurt that others cause you in this world will continue to be a hard thing to do because our hearts still have that selfish voice that wants to play God and punish the wrongdoer and get justice. But it helps to remember that it wasn’t easy for God to forgive, either. Our King had to give up his own Son so that he could forgive and forget our sins. And that same Son enables us to forgive and forget the sins of others because life isn’t about justice anymore – if it was, we would all be going to hell. It isn’t about protecting myself at all costs. Life now is one day after another with a pep in our step because a tremendous burden has been lifted off our shoulders. Life now is lived in the incredible forgiveness Jesus has given us.

This kind of forgiveness is not something we could have figured out on our own. The Rabbi’s of Jesus’ time didn’t have it right, Peter didn’t have it right, and our sinful and selfish hearts aren’t going to do it either. Forgiveness is something we need to learn from Jesus, from our King.

And boy is he ever a good teacher! Heavenly Father, our King, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Teach us to forgive. Move us to forgive. Because you have forgiven us. Amen.